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Gaia, the earth Goddess

The Earth itself is the being of which we are all
parts. It is Earth that lies our lives. Our lives are the lives of the
Earth.

IN PRAISE OF MOTHER EARTH

(written by Thay, Thich Nhat Hanh)

Homage to you Refreshing Earth Bodhisattva

Mother of this world with its many species.

We want to turn to you with respect,

Beautiful green planet in the midst of the sky,

You who have given birth to countless species,

Produced so many wonders of life,

Loved in the ultimate sense of non-discrimination,

Embraced all species not barring a single one,

Loyal and reliable, tolerant and stable,

The mother who bears all species.

Countless bodhisattvas spring up

From your fresh green lap.

Mother you embrace and transform

Sweeping away the hatred of humans,

Creating new life day and night,

Helping the earth to bloom with the flowers of heaven.

You are open to thousands of other galaxies,

Sharing your joy with the trichiliocosm,

By seeing that your true nature is interdependence.

Conserving and protecting so that nothing is lost,

Not being, not nothing, not eternal, not annihilated,

Not the same, not different, not coming, not going.

Your love knows no limits,

Your virtues no shortcomings.

Your nature is the Four Immeasurable Minds

Like the four great oceans they never dry up.

Whenever spring returns you wear a new robe

Of red roses, the green willow, beautiful and fresh.

When summer comes the vegetation displays its bright colours,

Wholesome seeds, sweet fruits are to be found everywhere.

How brilliant are the colours of the autumn forest

Until winter comes and snowflakes fill the sky.

The afternoon tide chants like the roll of thunder

The morning sunrise paints an incomparable picture,

Making visible all the splendours of the universe.

You are the most beautiful flower of the Solar System,

The wisdom that lights up the ten directions,

The mind that is open to all places.

Mother, you are the Paradise of the Present,

Making possible the future for all species.

We come back and take refuge in you,

With nothing to run after, accepting the unfavourable as also
favourable,

Seeing that you are always in us and

Seeing ourselves in you for all of time.

May we follow your good example,

And live every moment with true peace and joy.

Homage to the Refreshing Mother Earth Bodhisattva

An excerpt from Toby Johnson's Gay
Spirituality:
The Gaia Hypothesis

According to this new
paradigm, we are all part of the complex life of planet Earth. The name
given to the organism of the planet is that of the Greek Earth Goddess
Gaia.

This notion was first
suggested by evolutionary biologists James Lovelock and Lynn Margulis
as a code name for the observation that the Earth demonstrates
homeostatic mechanisms. The planet has changed and adjusted its
atmosphere to accommodate life. It has produced living organisms that
could adapt themselves to the atmosphere and then change the atmosphere
to suit them. The simplest example is that when plant life, which
inhales carbon dioxide and exhales oxygen, flourished and took over the
planet, animal life appeared that inhales oxygen and exhales carbon
dioxide. A necessary balance was achieved.

The Gaia Hypothesis says
the Earth can be understood as functioning like a single organism.
Extrapolated and mythologized this has become the notion that the Earth
itself is a living organism. And indeed that we are parts of it.

Ecology and
environmentalism, both as the modern scientific discovery of the
interplay of species and as a political cause against pollution and
destruction of nature, give additional flesh to the hypothesis. The web
of life is like the vast and intricate interplay of cells in our own
bodies, a process going on automatically without conscious control,
always working smoothly for the continuation of life and the growth of
intelligence and consciousness.

Perhaps the development of
life and intelligence is built into the structure of the universe. Life
happens in just the same way beautiful crystals grow in rocks and order
forms out of disorder. It takes no special intervention or miracle to
make life. The universe itself is alive.

Saying the universe is
alive is a little different from saying it is full of living things.
But electron microscopy has shown that the world around us swarms with
infinitesimal life: everywhere nematodes, mites, amoebas and paramecia,
bacteria, molds and viruses. In a single ounce of fertile soil, there
has been found to be well over a mile of fungus mycelium and comparable
lengths of other roots and more than 20 times as many bacteria as all
the men, women and children on Earth. Even our own bodies are colonized
all over by microbes, molds and even tiny, tiny insects that look more
ferocious than dinosaurs. How can we even begin to imagine the world
that might be to us as our world is to them? How can we distinguish
what is alive and what is not?

The Holographic
Universe

There is a parallel notion
that says the universe can be thought of as a great hologram. This
recent invention of laser technology provides a model for understanding
how everything is interconnected. A hologram is like a photograph, but
the gimmick of holography is that instead of storing an image that maps
point-to-point (as with a snapshot), this new technology stores a
pattern of wave interference that holds more information than a
photograph and holds it in a different way. Every point maps with every
other point. The entire image is stored everywhere on the surface.

The holographic model for
the universe says what we are experiencing in our mind’s eye that looks
like a movie of a three dimensional world of separate objects is really
a vast pattern of interference waves of energy. Everything is part of
everything else. The interpretation of the interference patterns into a
world happens in our brains—which, incidentally, also appear to store
information in interference patterns, not point-to-point mapping.

The holographic model is
another way of expressing in modern terms the notion that we are all
part of something bigger than ourselves. What we are only just now
coming to see is that we are not really isolated egos, fighting with
one another and fearing God’s retribution, but are cells of a larger
planetary being. We all have a place in the ecology of Earth.

Gaia Is Growing

Individual human beings
are organs of Gaia, patterns in the great hologram of planet Earth. At
least in metaphor, individual people are to Gaia as the individual
neurons in our brains are to us. Furthermore, the life of Gaia
parallels the life of an individual human being, growing from infancy
through childhood, adolescence and young adulthood to maturity, dealing
with the predictable stages of growth and tasks of psychological
development.

Gaia is growing, just like
a human being. We cannot tell where we are in the life cycle of the
planet because we have nothing to compare it to. But we can hypothesize
that the planet is near the end of childhood. The body has reached its
mature proportions by evolving intelligence and filling the globe. If
this is so, it is time for the adult personality to form by becoming
self-aware, eschewing superstition, and taking responsibility for the
direction of evolution and the outcome of life on Earth.

The consciousness that
sees from a higher perspective and in a larger context is fundamentally
evolutionary. This is the way we experience being part of the evolving
planetary consciousness. We are evolution become conscious.

The next evolutionary jump
is happening in consciousness. Perhaps this will result in a profound
awakening of the planetary mind into a collective consciousness. In
such a collective consciousness, human individuality will not be lost.
Instead, the isolation of individuals will be overcome in a general
awareness of everybody being part of everybody else.

This connectedness could
be a mystical phenomenon, perhaps a sort of telepathy. You might
imagine this awareness as a vivid experience of compassion for other
people and for the world itself. You might imagine it as a direct
perception of how other people see things, the feeling of “walking in
their shoes,” perhaps even the intuition of what it is like to see
through their eyes. You might imagine it as the immediate sense of the
Golden Rule so you feel consciously, like a sixth sense, how what you
do to others is really being done to you.

Perhaps this evolution
will happen less mystically and more technologically. The Internet and
instantaneous worldwide communications are constructing fiber optic
networks that will serve as neural pathways for a collective brain for
planet Earth. We are now exposed to the lives of people around the
globe. We see their pain when disaster strikes. We cannot avoid knowing
what is happening. The whole world now responds to the plight of
refugees or victims of disasters. A hundred years ago no one would have
bothered because no one would have known about them.

The danger is that
violence and greed will dominate the further evolution of humankind.
That is why a genuine transformation is needed. We cannot go on as we
have. The world cannot keep getting more and more crowded. We have to
change. To do this the human race must recognize and value the place of
non-reproducing people.

Outside And Inside

Perhaps the next step in
evolution will happen both outside and inside human beings as
consciousness evolves beyond us. Outside, electronic neural pathways
will connect us to one another and to a group consciousness. Inside, we
shall develop telepathic and empathetic abilities that will help us
understand and care for one another. That would be a real change in
human nature, but one consistent with the direction evolution has taken
so far.

Inevitably, computers will
become more and more directly interfaced with human consciousness,
“wet-wired” into the cerebrum. Then all human beings will be
interconnected like neurons of a global brain.

This will certainly change
how human beings experience sex. Already the Internet has created new
kinds of meeting and flirtation ritual. It permits long distance mutual
masturbation. There is no possibility of genetic or biological transfer
over the Web: no pregnancy, no disease. What will sex be like when
people can connect brain to brain, pleasure-center to pleasure-center,
through the phone lines? Will we be able to masturbate somebody else
from inside his or her brain? What will happen to heterosexuality and
homosexuality if we can get inside both men’s and women’s bodies? What
will it be like to have actual physical sex with another person while
being electronically linked to him? And/or to other people?

This is the stuff of
science fiction. Yet it is the logical—and probably desirable—extension
of computer interfaces: a modem that connects us to a central, common
memory bank, that feels like a sixth sense and that gives us access to
the wisdom and accumulated information from all the lives that are and
have ever been connected to the network.

Maybe, just maybe, if this
assembled network turns out to be sensitive to “karmic resonances” in
the planetary spirit field, like a radio receiver picking up signals
from the ether, all human lives will be accessible, all previous
incarnations of the human race “remembered” by the Super-Internet of
the future.

Gaydar

It is possible what is
called gay men’s sensitivity and the phenomenon of “gaydar,” by which
we recognize something about one another at the level of soul, might be
a hint at a kind of telepathy or psychic connection, a forerunner of
the birth of collective planetary consciousness.

A certain amount of
gaydar, of course, is return of mutual interest and flirtation, holding
a gaze just a little too long, for instance. A certain amount is
recognition of traits most people do not know enough about to be
sensitive to: slender wrists or a particular cant of the hips. A
certain amount is wishful thinking. And a certain amount of gaydar
seems to be almost psychic. There is a parallel phenomenon in New Age
mysticism and spiritualism in the ability to “see auras.”

Morphogenetic Fields

The notion of
Morphogenetic Fields, proposed by biologist Rupert Sheldrake, says
evolution goes on not at the level of individual organisms but at the
level of collective “fields.” These fields influence the structure of
organisms’ DNA just the way magnetic fields influence the arrangement
of iron filings around a magnet. Repetition of certain behaviors alters
the fields through “morphic resonance,” so that all organisms that
partake in that field are affected.

The notion of resonance
addresses the problem in Darwinian evolution that acquired traits
cannot be passed on. Conventional theory holds that evolution occurs by
natural selection of randomly occurring mutations. What is passed on
can only contain what an organism inherited from its parents. None of
its experience matters (except whether it lives long enough to
reproduce). The theory of morphogenetic fields explains how acquired
traits, the results of the forces of natural selection and cooperative
adaptation, can influence how mutation proceeds. This makes the whole
process more efficient and less dependent on serendipity and
coincidence.

The idea of morphogenetic
fields, officially called “the theory of formative causation,” has
entered pop-consciousness in the notion of the so-called
“hundredth-monkey effect.” The partly apocryphal story is told how a
tribe of monkeys living on a chain of islands off the coast of Japan
learned to wash sweet potatoes which researchers put out for them. At
first the monkeys scraped sand from the potatoes to make them more
palatable. Then one day one of them carried a potato to the seashore
and washed it in the surf. Noticing, a few others began to follow suit.
Soon, to the surprise of the researchers, all the monkeys were washing
their sweet potatoes. And this was so not only on the island where the
practice started, but on all the islands where this species of monkey
lived. When “critical mass” was achieved, all the monkeys, even those
outside the possibility of direct communication, knew to carry the
potatoes to the water. The discovery had affected the morphogenetic
field of the monkeys, creating a sudden jump in their development.

Proponents say a
demonstration of morphogenetic fields can be found in the high-tech
chemical industry. Science is constantly working to form new chemical
compounds. But it is often difficult to get a new compound to form. Yet
it has been observed that once a compound crystallizes in the desired
way, it becomes increasingly easier to get it to do so again. Soon this
elusive compound can be mass produced. And this is so around the world.
The mechanical explanation for this phenomenon is that seed crystals
from the original successful batch get into the environment, carried in
the hair and beards of scientists. A more elegant explanation is that
the crystallization of the compound establishes a “field” with which
the other crystals resonate and fall into place. This same phenomenon
might have happened with the formation of the organic compounds that
gave rise to life on Earth in the beginning.

Applied to human culture,
morphogenetic fields may affect all sorts of functions in human
physical development and in consciousness. The continual breaking of
athletic records is a simple example. Before Roger Bannister’s
accomplishment, running the 4-minute mile was thought impossible. Now
it is routine. The apparent ease with which each new generation copes
with technology may be a similar example. Children understand computers
while their parents still struggle with VCRs. The activity and
achievements of some people affect other people.

Perhaps, for instance,
when I fasten my seat belt every time I get in the car, I influence the
human complex of morphogenetic fields so that using the seat belt
becomes more natural for everybody. My personal behavior then affects
the whole world. My commitment to using a condom for penetrative sex
may make it easier for somebody else to think to do so. My virtue can
change the world. My beliefs put out morphic resonances that change
other people’s beliefs. It matters what I think.

If the planet has
self-adjusting mechanisms, then the appearance of gay people could be a
direct response to the crisis of overpopulation. And if we are indeed
special productions of Gaia, might not we have a natural vocation to be
concerned with ecological issues? Environmentalism and concern for the
planet’s well-being, recycling, eating good food, not polluting or
wasting energy should come to us naturally as we play out our role in
the evolutionary life of Gaia.

Toby Johnson, PhDis
author of nine books: three non-fiction books that apply the wisdom of
his
teacher and "wise old man," Joseph Campbell to modern-day social and
religious problems, four gay genre novels that dramatize spiritual
issues at the heart of gay identity, and two books on gay men's
spiritualities and the mystical experience of homosexuality and editor
of a collection of "myths" of gay men's consciousness.

Johnson's book
GAY
SPIRITUALITY: The Role of Gay Identity in the Transformation of
Human Consciousness won a Lambda Literary Award in 2000.

His GAY
PERSPECTIVE: Things Our [Homo]sexuality Tells Us about the Nature
of God and the Universe was nominated for a Lammy in 2003. They
remain
in
print.

FINDING
YOUR OWN TRUE MYTH: What I Learned from Joseph Campbell: The Myth
of the Great Secret III tells the story of Johnson's learning the
real nature of religion and myth and discovering the spiritual
qualities of gay male consciousness.